Trotsky: A BiographyBy Robert Service Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009600 pages

December 25, 2009 -- ESSF -- Robert Service has
written, to great acclaim, a new biography of Leon Trotsky. “Trotsky
moved like a bright comet across the political sky,” Service tells us.
Along with Lenin and other leaders of the Russian Revolution associated
with the Bolshevik – soon renamed Communist – party, “he first came to
global attention in 1917. … He lived a life full of drama played out
with the world as his stage. The October Revolution changed the course
of history, and Trotsky had a prominent role in the transformation. …
There is no denying Trotsky’s exceptional qualities. He was an
outstanding speaker, organizer and leader.” (1, 3)

As the workers’ councils (soviets) and earnest revolutionary ideals
of the Bolsheviks gave way to the increasingly vicious bureaucratic
dictatorship under Joseph Stalin, Trotsky became the most formidable
critic of what was happening. He was taken seriously not simply by
anti-Stalinists on the Left, “but by a large number of influential
commentators who detested the Stalin regime. Trotsky’s explanation of
what took place since the fall of the Romanov monarchy in February 1917
took root in Western historical works,” Service notes. At the same
time, “Stalin depicted Trotsky as a traitor to the October Revolution,
laid charges against him in the show-trials of 1936-8 and ordered
Soviet intelligence agencies to assassinate him. In 1940 they
succeeded.” (pp. 2, 1)

Yet Stalin’s Communism proved unable to sustain itself for even half
a century afterward. With the global triumph of capitalism, however,
there is also a multi-faceted global crisis of capitalism – assuming
far-reaching dimensions that are ecological, social, cultural,
political, military, and economic. Ten years ago the members of the
United Nations promised the achievement by 2015 of Millennium Goals
that would dramatically push back global poverty and hunger, also
advancing the empowerment of women and the education of children,
improvements in health care, improvements in environmental
sustainability, improvements in “fair trade,” and more. The modest
gains toward realizing the UN Millennium Goals are more than balanced
by setbacks and disappointments. An old socialist slogan of the 1970s –
“Capitalism Fouls Things Up” – seems quite relevant in the early 21st century.

This is certainly an ideal moment for people to engage with one of
the greatest revolutionaries of modern times. Service makes exciting
claims: that his searches among archival holdings shed new light on the
subject, and that he offers, for the first time, an objective account
of this symbol of revolutionary Marxism. But in more ways than one, the
book he has produced is not what it claims to be. In fact, what many
reviewers have enthused over, in their discussions of Service’s book,
is the demolition of what they (and Service) consider to be a myth. As
novelist and journalist Robert Harris approvingly comments in London’s Sunday Times,
“50 years after the last full-scale biography of Trotsky in English,
Robert Service has turned his attention to this myth – and has,
effectively, assassinated Trotsky all over again.” [1]

A cultural phenomenon

There is at least one problem here – the reviewer’s claim that this
is the first full-scale biography in English since the outstanding and
sympathetic three-volume work by Isaac Deutscher which appeared in the
1950s and ‘60s (and has been recently republished by Verso). In
fairness to Service, he himself actually asserts: “This book is the
first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside
Russia who is not a Trotskyist.” (xxi)

However phrased, the claim is simply not true. In 1975, Joel Carmichael produced a work of about 500 pages, Trotsky: An Appreciation of His Life. In 1977 Robert Payne’s The Life and Death of Trotsky (close to 500 pages) appeared. In 1979, Ronald Segal’s over 400-page biography, Leon Trotsky,
was published. Service’s purported biographical assassination comes in
at slightly more than each of these, but not by much. Service’s
emphasis on not being a Trotskyist is belied by the fact that these
three works are all non-Trotskyist — and two reject fundamentally (as
does Service) all that Trotsky stood for.

For that matter, over the past couple of years, preceding the
appearance of Service’s book, there have been three additional major
studies, all critical-to-hostile – Ian Thatcher’s Trotsky (2002), Geoff Swain’s Trotsky (2006), and Bertrand Patenaude’s Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary
(2009). It is remarkable that so many critical books have appeared on
Trotsky’s life. If one is willing to add a major Russian work
translated into English in 1995, there is Dmitri Volkoganov’s hostile Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary,
which received a reception quite similar to that accorded to Service’s
new volume. One might ask why such obsessive debunking must go on and
on … and on.

This is hardly a problem for Simon Sebag Montefiore (whose help
Service acknowledges in his preface). An upper-class historian,
novelist, and authority on Stalin, Montefiore complains in the
Conservative Daily Telegraph that “Trotsky, like Mao and to
some extent Lenin, has long been one of those Communist titans who, for
some, achieved the status of fashionable radical saints, even in the
democracies that they would have destroyed in an orgy of bloodletting.”
While “Lenin and Mao have been recast as brutal monsters not unlike
Stalin himself,” only now has Trotsky also been able to join the
pantheon of Red monsters – presented by Service in all his “ugly
egotism and unpleasant, overweening arrogance, the belief in and
enthusiastic practice of killing on a colossal scale.” [2]

The more politically neutral Times offers a more delicious
characterization by reviewer Richard Harris, hardly a Tory but rather
an enthusiastic supporter of the former “New Labor” Prime Minister Tony
Blair. Perhaps drawing from his own experience, he writes: “If one can
imagine the most obnoxious middle-class student radical one has ever
met — bitter, sneering, arrogant, selfish, cocky, callous, callow,
blinkered and condescending — and if one freezes that image, applies a
pair of pince-nez and transports it back to the beginning of the last
century, then one has Trotsky.” [3]

In the Wall Street Journal, scholar and human rights activist
Joshua Rubenstein offers a mixed judgment. While praising Service’s
“vivid” and “long overdue” biography as “approaching Trotsky without
emotional or ideological attachment” (which could be the understatement
of the year), he also accurately notes that Service “slips into
personal animus that is sometimes out of place,” and that the book
“hardly discusses Trotsky’s writings, either as a Marxist theoretician
or as an accomplished and independent journalist” – which is a
remarkable limitation, given the centrality of such things to all that
Trotsky was. [4]
What would one make of biographies about Newton or Darwin or Einstein
that hardly discussed their scientific theories? This is a fatal
limitation: one cannot understand and assess Trotsky without a more
serious-minded engagement with his ideas.

At least one reviewer, Tariq Ali, in the left-leaning Guardian
simply slams “Service’s plodding account in which some of the
allegations are so trivial that they are best ignored.” He adds, as if
amplifying Rubenstein’s point about the failure to deal with Trotsky’s
actual ideas: “On most of the important issues – the danger of
substituting the party for the state in Russia, the necessity of
uniting with social-democrats and liberals to defeat Hitler, the
futility of forcing the communists into an alliance with Chiang
Kai-shek in China, the fate that awaited the Jews if Hitler came to
power and constant warnings that the Nazis were preparing to invade the
Soviet Union – he was proved right time and time again.” [5]

The actual book

Engaging seriously with the actual book under review, one cannot
agree fully with the judgments of the reviewers just cited. It is
somewhat better, and much worse, than one might be led to believe.
Service’s study is really quite readable. The prose is clear, and the
story interesting. It follows the basic outline sketched by Trotsky
himself in his literary masterpiece My Life, supplemented by Deutscher’s brilliant trilogy – The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast.
This provides a coherent structure, which Service seeks in a
workman-like manner to compress into a more succinct, relatively
fast-paced narrative.

Service certainly dispenses large dollops of the negative judgment
regarding Trotsky, the stuff that many reviews on the right and left
focus on. Debating about Trotsky with Christopher Hitchens, under the
auspices of the Hoover Institution, Service characterized the
revolutionary as “the most amazingly brilliant man . . . but such a
dreadful mistake of a life and a career.” [6] That matches the thrust of his speaking tours, and of all the publicity around the book.

Nonetheless, there remains the strong influence of Deutscher’s
magisterial biography, the considerable researches from post-1960s
social historians on the Russian Revolution (essentially corroborating
John Reed’s exuberantly sympathetic eyewitness account, Ten Days That Shook the World),
and the power of Trotsky’s own writings. All push into the pages of
Service’s biography, and they push in a different direction than that
in which he himself prefers to travel.

More than this, in some ways — not in all, as we shall see — Service
proves himself a capable historian. He spent many years researching
Lenin, producing a capable if increasingly hostile three-volume
political summary, “capped” by a sadly inferior (though widely lauded)
biography. This has given him a fair sense of the shape of the history
of the Russian revolutionary movement leading up to the 1917
Revolution. This stands him in good stead as he contextualizes much of
Trotsky’s story. In addition to this, and in addition to the use of a
considerable amount of secondary literature, he actually spent time
mining the archives and has come up with new material.

Service makes much of this archival exploration, promising new revelations supposedly culled from earlier drafts of My Life
and other writings. While there are, in fact, no stunningly defamatory
“revelations” forthcoming from the archives, there are insights offered
from – for example – correspondence between Trotsky and his first wife
Alexandra. A youthful Trotsky, imprisoned for revolutionary activities,
writes to his lover: “Mikhailovski in an article about Lassalle says
that one can be more frank with the woman one loves than with oneself;
this is to a certain degree true but such frankness is possible only in
a personal conversation but not always, only in special and exceptional
circumstances.” Engaging with such correspondence, Service comments
aptly: “Then and later he favored extreme images and striking turns of
phrase. This was no artificial invention. It flowed from the
personality of someone who did not feel alive unless he could
communicate with others.” (52, 53)

At the same time, there is a remarkable sloppiness that crops up in
this book. For example, Service speculates that Trotsky’s father hired
a rabbi to teach his young son the Torah (24) – but his source is the
short account by Max Eastman in Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth,
which makes it clear that the father hired a private tutor — one who
had a beard, to be sure, but who was an agnostic scholar, not a rabbi.
This matches the relatively secular inclinations that Service
acknowledges were characteristic of Trotsky’s father. It is odd that,
with no more evidence to cite than Eastman, Service converts this into
Jewish religious instruction. [7]

At times, his “facts” are simply wrong. Service tells us that
Trotsky “spoke out against ‘individual terror’ in 1909 when the
Socialist-Revolutionaries murdered the police informer Evno Azev, who
had penetrated their Central Committee.” (113) But this is impossible.
Azev most definitely was a police spy who held a position of immense
authority within the Socialist-Revolutionary organization: coordinating
the terrorist assassinations carried out by the
Socialist-Revolutionaries. This was a tactic which Trotsky and other
Marxists of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party absolutely
opposed. But Azev himself, after being exposed, escaped to Germany,
where he was imprisoned until 1917 and apparently died of kidney
disease in 1918. [8]
Why would Trotsky denounce a murder that never happened? Of course he
didn’t. But it certainly undermines one’s confidence in Service’s
ability to get things right.

There are also examples of important facts being left out of the
account. One of the most disconcerting comes up in Service’s seemingly
detailed account of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. The Bolshevik
Revolution had come to power promising “peace, bread, land” and one of
the highest priorities for the new soviet government was to extricate
Russia from the devastation of the First World War, with Trotsky as the
chief peace negotiator with the Germans, “moving like a weaver’s
shuttle between Brest-Litovsk and the Russian capital,” as Service
nicely phrases it. (208) The German military sought to impose a very
nasty settlement, which the revolutionaries were loathe to accept. Some
argued for waging “revolutionary war” against German imperialism while
Lenin insisted that the regime must sign the German peace terms,
however odious. Trotsky took a middle position – “neither peace nor
war” – in hopes that through drawing the negotiations out and peppering
them with widely-publicized revolutionary speeches, the proletarian
ferment visible in Central Europe would be transformed into workers’
uprisings. Service notes that Trotsky first won a majority (even the
anxious and skeptical Lenin went along). But then, he tells us, Lenin
somehow – presumably through persuasive conversations and lobbying
among his comrades – was finally able to secure a majority for making
peace. How did this happen? What Service inexplicably fails to mention
is that the German military, losing patience, launched a massive and
successful offensive which demonstrated the hollowness of the
“revolutionary war” notion and the inadequacy of Trotsky’s compromise
position. The German High Command then put forward even more odious
demands which Lenin now had little difficulty in persuading a majority
to accept. [9]

There are a number of surprising examples of more minor sloppiness.
For example, André Breton, the poet and theorist of surrealism who
sympathized with Trotsky, is consistently but incorrectly identified as
a “surrealist painter.” (399, 453, 461) The anti-Trotskyist Bertram
Wolfe is mistaken for Trotsky adherent Bernard Wolfe (441). At one
point Service tells us: “Instead of calling his first son after his own
father, he and Natalya had chosen the name Sergei.” (201) But of course
Sergei Sedov was the second son and Lev Sedov the first, as Service
himself documents elsewhere in the book.

More than once such sloppiness is exposed by Service himself.
Describing the 1916 voyage of Trotsky and his family to New York on a
Spanish steamship, Service tells us that “Trotsky claimed they
travelled second class.” This is “exposed” as “a silly fib,” since –
while paying for second-class tickets – it was found that the
second-class berths were overbooked, “and they were given a first-class
cabin at no extra charge.” But according to the footnote Service
offers, Trotsky was telling this “silly fib” to himself, since it
appeared (apparently as a mistaken recollection) in his 1935 diary, not
meant for publication and only published after his death. In the same
passage, Service asserts that the Trotskys “did not mingle with
passengers from the lowest decks,” feeling “no impulse to spend time
talking to workers.” Yet a few lines later, Service tells us that, in
discussions about World War I, “Trotsky only met one person who
appealed to him. This was a housemaid from Luxembourg.” In the next
paragraph, Service tells us, an entry in Trotsky’s diary indicates that
his sons “made friends with the Spanish sailors, who told them that
they would soon get rid of the monarchy in Madrid,” which – one would
assume – also appealed to Trotsky. (153)

Personality and politics

As already noted, there is a significant amount of anti-Trotsky
editorializing, especially concentrated in the book’s introductory and
concluding sections, but interlarded as sniping assertions,
speculations, and projections throughout much of the biography. The
book’s purpose, Service insists, “is to dig up the buried life” of a
man whose “self-serving account of Stalin and Stalinism deeply
influenced the discourse of writers both left and right,” but who had
himself demonstrated a “lust for dictatorship and terror,” and, in
fact, positively “reveled in terror.” (The faint-hearted need not fear
– the book never really presents such raw lust and reveling!) Trotsky’s
character, according to Service, involved the following traits, to take
some of those offered in the book’s index: alienating others,
arrogance, aversion to sentimentality, bossiness, careless about
people’s attitudes to him, dislike of losing at games, egotism,
impatience with stupidity, insensitivity, perfectionism, prickliness,
Puritanism, temper, vanity, self-centered, will to dominate. (4, 499,
497, 597) Nor is this all wrong.

Isaac Deutscher also affirmed that Trotsky sometimes displayed a
“prickly and overbearing character and a lack of talent for teamwork.”
Trotsky’s Bolshevik comrade Anatoly Lunacharsky offered an acidly frank
pen-portrait in 1923: “His colossal arrogance and an inability or
unwillingness to show any human kindness or to be attentive to people,
the absence of that charm which always surrounded Lenin, condemned
Trotsky to a certain loneliness.” Others, including Service, indicate
that Trotsky could indeed show kindness and great charm, and that over
time he mellowed somewhat – and yet these less endearing
characteristics never vanished. From the archives he digs out
correspondence to Trotsky’s second wife Natalya from Lev Sedov,
Trotsky’s capable revolutionary-activist son, complaining in 1936 “that
all of Papa’s failings are getting worse with age: his intolerance, hot
temper, teasing, even crudity and desire to offend,” and that “Papa
never recognizes when he’s in the wrong. That’s why he can’t bear
criticism. When something is said or written to him with which he
disagrees he either ignores it entirely or gets back with a harsh
reply.” (230, 431-432) Yet other qualities that Lunacharsky stressed
also persisted – “the remarkable coherence and literary skill of his
phrasing, the richness of imagery, scalding irony, his soaring pathos,
his rigid logic, clear as polished steel,” and the fact that “there is
not a drop of vanity in him, he is totally indifferent to any title or
to the trappings of power.” And yet, Lunacharsky concluded, “Trotsky
treasures his historical role and would probably make any personal
sacrifice . . . in order to go down in human memory surrounded by the
aureole of a genuine revolutionary leader.” [10] (Some see this latter quality as a flaw, others as a strength.)

While there is overlap between much of this and aspects of Service’s
description, essential elements in his negative characterization
(charges of hypocrisy, ingrained authoritarianism, “reveling in
terror”) seem to flow from the author’s desire to turn people against a
serious consideration of Trotsky’s orientation, not from the research
he has done. One suspects it precedes that research and is rooted in
his ideological and institutional commitments. While Service is not
up-front about his own politics, in the first sentence of the book’s
preface he forthrightly describes the Hoover Institution as his “base.”
For many years it has been widely known for its conservative
orientation, and Service enjoys the status of a highly esteemed Senior
Fellow there.

The Hoover Institution’s mission statement affirms “the principles
of individual, economic, and political freedom; private enterprise; and
representative government were fundamental to the vision of the
Institution’s founder,” the conservative U.S. President Herbert Hoover,
who believed deeply in laissez-faire capitalism. “By collecting
knowledge, generating ideas, and disseminating both, the Institution
seeks to secure and safeguard peace, improve the human condition, and
limit government intrusion into the lives of individuals.” The
influence on Service of this perspective was suggested during his
Trotsky debate with Christopher Hitchens at the Hoover Institution
itself. “With a centralized state-run economy,” he argued, even with “a
somewhat more astute character such as Trotsky, . . . it was an
absolute certainty that you couldn’t . . . get the kind of results that
you wanted for popular consumption such as you can have under a market
economy.” [11]

Whatever the motivation and underlying ideology, all too often we
find Service engaged in an odd game of scoring of nasty personal
points. It gets in the way of what one might expect from a serious
biographer. Here are four examples among many.

In reaction to Trotsky’s love letters to Alexandra, in which he
expresses doubts and depression, Service informs us that “unconsciously
Trotsky was trying to induce Alexandra to do more than love him: he
wanted her to understand and look after him and perhaps this could be
achieved by admissions of weakness.” How does Service know that
Trotsky’s admission was an insincere calculation? An admission of
weakness to someone you love is not necessarily a manipulative ploy.
Service’s put-down of Trotsky here is out of harmony with his seeming
acceptance of Trotsky’s admission to Alexandra that “one can be more
frank with the woman one loves than with oneself.” (52)

Sometimes, Service’s eagerness to be critical interjects a
superficiality cutting across a more substantial and plausible
criticism that could be made. As a very young revolutionary, when he
and his comrades had been arrested, Trotsky took the lead in a rather
pointless challenge to prison authorities that landed him and his
comrades all in solitary confinement. “As with several such episodes of
daring in his life, Trotsky did not include this information in his
published memoirs.” But the initial hot-headed “heroism” had been
unnecessary. After the punishment, we are told, Trotsky and his
comrades chose the path of peaceful cooperation. Service prefers the
following: “It had to be dragged out of him by admiring writers.
Although he liked to cut a dash in public, he disliked boasting: he
preferred others to do the job for him.” (56) A less convoluted
explanation, however, is that Trotsky was by no means proud of such
immature and pointless “daring.” Perhaps he was a little ashamed.

During his exile in Vienna, Trotsky is hit in rapid succession by
a series of troubling events – the death of his mother, a painful
accident at the dentist from which he gradually recovers, the sudden
appearance of his eleven year old daughter from his first marriage
(after five years of not seeing her), who visits from the Ukraine in
the company of his father. Trotsky then suffers an illness brought on
by stress. His father goes with him to the doctor. “Perhaps Trotsky had
taken his father along because he needed him to pay for the
consultation,” Service speculates. “His letters [neither quoted not
cited] hint at a further motive. Trotsky seems to have appreciated
being accompanied by someone devoted to his interests. He was again the
center of attention, and the joint visit to the Viennese professor
restored his spirits.” (123-124) Why turn this all into an example of
Trotsky being egotistical and self-centered? In fact, it might make
sense for a father to want to be there for his son under trying
circumstances, and it might be natural for even a person in his 30s to
value and need the company and reassurance and caring of his father. In
the 1920s, Max Eastman noted: “Trotsky is proud of his father…. He
loves to talk about him.” [12]

There is a parenthetical comment about Trotsky and Karl Radek in
1915: “They were almost friends, insofar as either man had any.” (145)
Yet Service himself notes close friendships that Trotsky had with Adolf
Joffe and Christian Rakovsky, and – among those who were outside of the
Trotskyist movement – one could add Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer as
well as Otto Rühle and Alice Rühle-Gerstel. There are other friendships
one could mention (in addition to friendships with certain members of
his family). [13]

Nonetheless, Service is enough of an historian that often the
material takes over the man, drawing the narrative into a clear account
of what Trotsky and other revolutionaries actually thought and
attempted and accomplished. In describing the months leading up to the
October/November Revolution of 1917, describing the process of
convergence of the most committed revolutionaries into the Bolshevik
party, he gives a true sense of the realities. He quotes the future
Bolshevik Moisei Uritsky who was powerfully impressed (as were many) by
Trotsky, freshly returned from exile and showing himself to be one of
the most eloquent, passionate, brilliant mass orators: “Here’s a great
revolutionary who’s arrived and one gets the feeling that Lenin,
however clever he may be, is starting to fade next to the genius of
Trotsky.” Service writes:

Lenin felt no worry about having personal rivals on the
political far left. He needed and wanted active, talented associates
such as Trotsky. He and Trotsky agreed on a broad agenda for revolution
in Russia. The Provisional Government had to be done away with and a
“workers’ government” instituted. The era of European socialist
revolution had arrived. The Great War would be terminated only when the
far leftists came to power and repudiated capitalism, imperialism,
nationalism and militarism. There had to be immediate basic reform in
Russia. The peasantry should take over the land of the Imperial family,
the state and the Orthodox Church. Workers should control the
factories. . . . All spoke approvingly of the power of the masses.
There was agreement that workers and peasants should be encouraged to
remake life as they wanted. Factories, offices and farms ought to be
reorganized. Differences remained among Bolsheviks – and they were
about to be brought to the surface the moment the party seized power.
But between February and October the disputes were containable. . . .
[T]he Provisional Government [of pro-capitalist and moderate socialist
politicians] had to be overthrown in favor of a revolutionary
administration. Fundamental social and economic reform would then be
implemented. The European war would be brought to an end. Revolution in
Russia would be followed by the overturning of the ruling classes
throughout Europe. Failure to act would be a disaster. The
counter-revolutionary elements in the former Russian Empire were
waiting for their opportunity to strike.” (167-169)

All of this gives a good sense of how things were – in the thinking
of Lenin, Trotsky, and others who rallied to make the Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917.

Problems of communism

The problem with this, from Service’s standpoint (and that of the
Hoover Institution), is that the revolutionary socialist goals are
simply impossible to achieve. Presumably, the only reasonable path
involves supporting private enterprise and limiting government
intrusion into our social life, as explained in the Hoover mission
statement. Violation of such strictures results in chaos, and as a
consequence would-be revolutionaries, still determined to force their
ideals onto an unwilling society, inevitably construct a totalitarian
order. This defines the story that Service feels he must tell.

Service’s view was sharply challenged in his debate with
ex-Trotskyist Christopher Hitchens. The most powerful forces initiating
a brutal civil war against the Bolshevik Revolution had little desire,
as Hitchens put it, to replace the workers’ and peasants’ soviets by “a
parliamentary democracy with an independent judiciary.” He noted that
“if Trotsky’s Red Army had not won the Russian Civil War, then the word
for fascism . . . was probably going to be the Russian word instead of
an Italian word.” Service squirmed a bit: “It’s a little exaggerated,
but it’s pretty fair that the Whites had officers who were vicious,
carried out a brutal civil war against the Reds.” To which Hitchens
snorted: “Brought the Protocols of the Elders of Zion [an
anti-Semitic classic concocted by Russian reactionaries] to Europe in
their backpacks when they left. Not doing us any favors. Brings the
German [version] of Fascism with it!” Throughout much of Europe,
varieties of fascism and vicious dictatorships received support from
the upper-classes to create a barrier to the spread of revolution. [14]

Contrary to the expectations of Lenin and Trotsky, and despite the
upwelling of global insurgencies, socialist revolutions of the workers
and peasants were not triumphant outside of Russia. The isolation of
this vast but backward country in a hostile capitalist world, the
brutalization of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the destructive
impact of all these factors on the Russian economy combined with the
revolutionaries’ own mistakes and managerial inexperience – the result
being a horrendous crisis, dramatically eroding popular confidence in
the revolutionary regime. A “temporary” Communist party dictatorship
was consequently established to secure stability until the Soviet
republic could be rescued by the “imminent” World Revolution that never
quite materialized. Many revolutionaries died or de-radicalized in the
five years after 1917, although both idealistic and opportunistic
elements from the larger population flocked to the new party in power.
In many cases, the surviving Communists and newer Communists – if they
were not in the “rank-and-file” – became corrupted with their exclusive
access to power and privilege. Lenin died in the midst of the crisis,
in alliance with Trotsky pushing against the expanding, increasingly
privileged party-and-state bureaucracy that ruled in the name of
Communism. Lenin’s last struggle was too little, too late.

It fell to Trotsky to become the primary spokesman and symbol of the
Left Opposition. There were earlier left-wing oppositional currents
which Trotsky and Lenin had short-sightedly helped vanquish. [15]
There would also be later ones – the more frightened and ineffectual
“Right Opposition” led by Nikolai Bukharin, and the more militant yet
hopeless stirrings associated with Mikhail Riutin. But Trotsky’s
opposition – whatever its limitations and contradictions – represented
the most impressive, consistent, persistent alternative to the
bureaucratic tyranny and murderous policies that triumphed under
Stalin. After its thoroughgoing defeat in the late 1920s, and
particularly after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, Trotsky sought
to build up a principled revolutionary current in the world Communist
movement (the parties associated with the Communist International, or
Third International). When he concluded that the bureaucratic
dictatorship in the Soviet Union could be replaced by democratic
soviets of the workers and peasants only through a revolutionary
overthrow, he drew those from various countries who agreed with him
into the small but uncompromising Fourth International, whose small
parties and grouplets sought to provide “a stainless banner” to the
workers and the oppressed, in hopes that the anticipated new wave of
wars and revolutions would draw masses of workers and oppressed peoples
to the revolutionary Marxist, Bolshevik-Leninist perspective that he
and his comrades sought to preserve.

Service’s attitude toward all of this is marked by utter contempt,
asserting again and again that Trotsky “shared many of Stalin’s
assumptions,” specifically: “He called for state economic planning and
offered nothing that was essentially different from Soviet practices
except the assurance that he would do things less violently and more
democratically.” (357) It is obvious why a Senior Fellow of the Hoover
Institution might be horrified over Trotsky’s commitment to state
economic planning (this Trotsky certainly did share with Stalin), but
one wonders at Service’s dismissive attitude toward making economic
planning less violent and more democratic.

Unfortunately, one of the many bits of misinformation conveyed in
this biography is Service’s assertion that Trotsky, “in his
autobiography of 1930 would represent himself as a constant critic of
the basic official measures introduced in the 1920s,” particularly the
concessions to market economics represented by the New Economic Policy
(NEP) which stretched from 1921 to 1928. Service correctly points out:
“Trotsky never called for the NEP to be abandoned even while calling
for certain features to be modified or removed. He accepted that the
Soviet economy would require a private sector for the foreseeable
future.” The problem with what Service says is that Trotsky indicates
the same in his 1930 autobiography. There he notes that Stalin and
other critics in the Communist Party leadership “discovered that my
stand at the time was one of ‘under-appreciation of the peasantry,’ and
one almost hostile toward the New Economic Policy. This was really the
basis of all the subsequent attacks on me. In point of fact, of course,
the roots of the discussion were quite the opposite…” When Lenin
“shaped the first and very guarded theses on the change to the New
Economic Policy,” Trotsky continued (and Service documents), “I
subscribed to them at once.” Lenin and Trotsky favored, for this
period, a form of mixed economy under workers’ control (until new
possibilities of socialist development would be opened by workers’
revolutions in more advanced industrial countries). At the same time,
the two agreed to “a bloc against bureaucracy in general,” as Trotsky
put it in his autobiography. This was to become a key pillar in the
program of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, sustained when he joined with
others (including Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, for a time Lenin’s
widow Nadezhda Krupskaya) in what came to be known as the United
Opposition. “The Leningrad workers were aroused by the political trend
in favor of the rich peasants – the so-called kulaks – and a policy
aimed at one-country socialism.” This attitude was certainly embraced
by the Opposition. But never was it advanced in opposition to the basic
measures represented by NEP – nor does Trotsky seek to give this
impression in his autobiography. [16]

Internationalism and workers’ democracy

Another key pillar of Trotsky’s program, while leading the Left
Opposition and afterward, was continuing (in the spirit of Lenin’s
Bolsheviks) to tie the fate of the Soviet Union to the spread of
socialist revolutions to other countries. Service complains that in his
revolutionary internationalism Trotsky “offered no analysis of how far
he was willing to risk the existence of the Soviet state.” (357) Here
again it is the biographer, not Trotsky, who seems to be at one with
Stalin, who insisted that – regardless of what happened with the world
revolution, the Communist regime could and should focus on building
“socialism in one country.” [17]

Trotsky – like all Marxists up to the 1920s – understood that
socialism could not be built in a single economically backward country.
The ability of the workers and peasants of Russia to move forward to a
better life, and to the thoroughgoing economic democracy that socialism
was supposed to be, was dependent on their moving forward on the same
path as, and receiving life-giving assistance from, the working classes
making socialist revolutions in the more advanced industrial countries.
Naturally, the anti-colonial revolutions in Asia and Africa would also
be essential to bringing down global capitalism. [18]
Insurgencies in the “backward” regions would feed insurgencies in the
“advanced” economic centers – which would then further assist the march
of progress in the “backward regions. This had been the whole point of
devoting so much time and energy and resources to building up the
Communist International and its member parties.

The fact that Service (along with many others) doesn’t quite “get
it” is suggested in the way he discusses Trotsky’s revolutionary
internationalism, especially in the post-1917 period. It is almost as
if one were discussing fashion, rather like one’s taste for “political
correctness” or one’s taste in ties: “Trotsky remained a vigorous
internationalist. He wrote endlessly about the need for revolution in
Europe and Asia. This too was hardly an unusual standpoint to take in
the first years after the October revolution, but Trotsky held to it
with remarkable firmness. . . . He remained averse to either extolling
or deprecating the qualities of particular peoples and believed that
this was the proper approach of a Marxist.” (207) This last comment is
true but beside the point. Quite simply, without the triumph of
revolutionary internationalism, the revolution in Russia would be
defeated.

In a later attempt to get it right, Service opines that the reason
for building “a fresh global organization dedicated to bringing down
capitalism and promoting revolution,” the Communist International, was
rooted in the concern that “so long as they ruled the sole extreme-left
European state they would remain a likely target for attack by a
coalition of capitalist powers.” This conception was shared by Stalin
and his temporary ally Nikolai Bukharin in the mid-to-late 1920s. But
Trotsky responded: “The capitalist world shows us by its export and
import figures that it has other instruments of persuasion than those
of military intervention.” Against them he quoted Lenin: “So long as
our Soviet Republic remains an isolated borderland surrounded by the
entire capitalist world, so long will it be an absolutely ridiculous
fantasy and utopianism to think of our complete economic independence
and of the disappearance of any of our dangers.” Warning against the
notion that “the USSR can perish from military intervention but never
from its own economic backwardness,” he insisted that so long as the
Soviet Union existed within a global capitalist economy, it would not
be possible for it to achieve socialism. This had been a perspective
shared by Lenin and the early Bolsheviks – but the new bureaucratic
power elite crystallizing around Stalin, denying any break with Lenin’s
thought, embraced the notion that it was possible to achieve “socialism
in one country.”

Service has so little understanding of Trotsky’s Marxism that he
attributes to him the notion that “Marxists in Russia would be able to
. . . build an entire socialist society.” (109) In fact, while Stalin
proceeded to advance toward such “socialism” in economically backward
Russia (through his brutal and murderous “revolution from above”),
Trotsky insisted prophetically that such efforts could at best result
in a “skinflint reactionary utopia of self-sufficient socialism” that
had little to do with the actual socialist goal. Genuine socialism
could only be created on the basis of relative abundance, and as part
of the transition from global capitalism to worldwide socialism.
Service does not bother to deal with this 1928 critique of the
Stalin-Bukharin Draft Program for the Sixth Congress of the Communist
International (which he even mistakenly confuses with the Fifth
Congress).

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky deepened his analysis by
referring to the perspective advanced by Karl Marx nine decades
earlier: “A development of the productive forces is the absolutely
necessary practical premise [of Communism], because without it want is
generalized, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again,
and that means that all the old crap must revive.” The reference to
“all the old crap” is to brutal competition, inequality, exploitation,
oppression – qualities that characterized Stalin’s version of
“socialism” no less than capitalism. Trotsky elaborated:

“The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in
objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against
all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come
whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are
compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is
necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting
point of the Soviet bureaucracy. It “knows” who is to get something and
who has to wait.” [19]

None of this comes through in the dozen sentences that Service devotes to The Revolution Betrayed,
the 1936 culmination of more than a decade of analytical effort and one
of the keystones of Trotsky’s theoretical heritage. He remains
remarkably dismissive of the passionate critique that the object of his
biography advances through the 1930s. “The bureaucracy can no longer
uphold its position in any other way than by undermining the
foundations of economic and cultural progress,” according to Trotsky.
“The struggle for totalitarian power resulted in the annihilation of
the best men of the country by its most degraded scoundrels.” His
proposal was for a political revolution initiating the following
changes: “the establishment of the widest Soviet democracy and the
legalization of the struggle of parties; the liquidation of the
never-changing bureaucratic caste by electing all functionaries; the
mapping out of all economic plans with the direct participation of the
population itself and in its interests; the elimination of the crying
and insulting gaps of inequality; the liquidation of ranks, orders, and
all other distinctions of the new Soviet nobility; a radical change of
external politics in the spirit of principled internationalism.” [20]

In the face of all this and more, Service shrugs: “He was no more
likely than Stalin to create a society of humanitarian socialism even
though he claimed and assumed he would. … His confident assaults on
Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s distracted attention from the
implausibility of his own alternative strategy.” (497) The reason for
this, apparently, was the authoritarian role he had played in the
crisis of civil war and economic collapse from 1918 to 1922. “The
Bolshevik party had treated even workers and peasants savagely whenever
they engaged in active opposition,” Service writes. “Trotsky’s earlier
ideas about ‘proletarian’ self-liberation were like old coins that had
dropped unnoticed out of his pocket.” (267) For seriously
revolutionary-minded people, Trotsky’s trajectory in these years raises
important questions – but for Service it slams all doors firmly shut.
He seems to use what happened in this intense five-year period to
dismiss everything that Trotsky thinks, says and does afterward, and to
question all that went before.

This is in stark contrast to the interpretation offered by
Deutscher, who comments that “in the first half of 1922 Trotsky still
spoke primarily as the Bolshevik disciplinarian; in the second half he
was already in conflict with the disciplinarians,” coming “closer to
the Workers Opposition and kindred groups” – not accepting what he
believed to be utopian, unrealistic aspects of their positions, but
“acknowledging the rational side of their revulsion against authority.
… He began to protest against the excesses of centralism as these made
themselves felt. . . . He clashed with the party ‘apparatus’ as the
apparatus grew independent of the party and subjected party and state
to itself.” Deutscher emphasizes what he perceives as the growing
cleavage between “the power and the dream” – and the deepening
contradiction felt by the Bolsheviks who had created a machine of power
to make the dream a reality. “They could not dispense with power if
they were to strive for the fulfillment of their ideals; but now their
power came to oppress and overshadow their ideals.” Deutscher added:
“Nobody had in 1920-1 gone farther than Trotsky in demanding that every
interest and aspiration should be wholly subordinated to the ‘iron
dictatorship.’ Yet he was the first of the Bolshevik chiefs to turn
against the machine of that dictatorship when it began to devour the
dream.” [21]

Service will have none of this. But he does not succeed in providing
a persuasive and coherent alternative perspective. Rejecting both the
dream and the power, he can find no redeeming qualities in the subject
to which he devotes more than 500 pages.

The actual Trotsky

Regardless of one’s political standpoint, serious engagement with
Trotsky’s life and ideas generally results in one being more profoundly
and positively impressed than Service and his cheer-leaders would have
us be. Christopher Hitchens – breaking from Trotskyist and
revolutionary perspectives, and tacking closer to the Hoover
Institution’s conservative orientation than he certainly had ever
imagined – has not been able to stop himself from insisting that
Trotsky was “a person of immense moral and physical courage . . . who .
. . wrote pamphlets and made speeches against the menace of Hitlerism,
which are much better and were made much earlier than any of Winston
Churchill’s.” [22]
The splendid literary and social critic Irving Howe, another
ex-Trotskyist who avoided tacking quite so far rightward, felt
compelled to insist thirty years ago that Trotsky “must be regarded as
one of the great writers of his time,” and went on to specify:

Perhaps nowhere else do these talents shine forth so brightly as
in Trotsky’s writings in the early 1930s on the rise of Nazism. These
consist of articles and pamphlets composed hurriedly in exile: there is
no effort to work out a theoretical synthesis, partly because Trotsky’s
major objective is to offer tactical guidance for preventing Hitler’s
victory and partly because the phenomenon of Nazism is still new. But
such brilliant works . . . contain within them many of the elements
needed for a theory of Nazism. … Trotsky’s main purpose in these
writings was not to provide a full-scale theory of fascism but to stir
the German left toward concerted action. With blazing sarcasm and
urgency – he never could be patient toward fools – he attacked the
preposterous policy of the German Communists [following Stalin], who in
their ultra-left “third period” were declaring the Social Democrats to
be “social fascists” representing a greater danger than the Nazis.
Trotsky kept insisting on what seems utterly clear and simple: that
only a united front (“march separately, strike together”) of the
Communists and Social Democrats could stop Hitler. … Had Trotsky’s
advice been followed … the world might have been spared some of the
horrors of our century; at the very least, the German working class
would have gone down in battle the than allowing the Nazi thugs to take
power without resistance. [23]

How could it be that Service would shrug this off?

With a similar minimal engagement with the documentary sources,
Service also shrugs off the efforts to build up the Fourth
International – a global network of revolutionary socialist
organizations, quite small but to which Trotsky devoted the final years
of his life. Howe sees him in these years as a figure of “flawed
greatness … an all too human figure,” who “alternates between periods
of ferocious work and sluggish withdrawal. He feels guilty with regards
to his children, all of whose lives, in one way or another, have been
sacrificed in the political struggle. He is afraid that he may die
before finishing his revolutionary task. He is overcome by the
incongruity between the magnitude of his political perspective and the
paltriness of his political means.” Nonetheless, “caustic and proud,
shaking off his personal griefs in order to return to the discipline of
work,” he tries to do the very best he can – particularly in what Howe
sees as the “ill-starred venture” of the Fourth International. [24]

Service cannot allow himself such critical generosity. There are a
scattering of little nuggets drawn from the archives – although, in
some cases already published and long-available to the rest of us. A
genuinely revolutionary approach of socialist organizations toward
workers in struggle should be “not to command the workers but only to
help them, to give them suggestions, to arm them with facts, ideas,
factory papers, special leaflets, and so on.” The need to make
revolutionary socialist organizations “habitable for workers” (not just
intellectual and white-collar workers) was a primary concern for
Trotsky. “Many intellectuals and half-intellectuals terrorize the
workers by some abstract generalities and paralyze the will toward
activity,” he cautioned. “A functionary of a revolutionary party should
have in the first place a good ear, and only in the second place a good
tongue.” (443) [25]

For the most part, however, Service is satisfied with
superficialities (“global Trotskyism was a lot less substantial than
Stalin imagined”) and snide inaccuracies: “He had sealed himself in the
cave of his fundamental beliefs. He allowed no questioning of them. He
bullied his followers who dared to object; and he preferred them to
leave the Fourth International than to cause him bother.” (441, 472)
Whatever limitations one sees in Trotsky’s political practice in the
Fourth International, serious histories of the Fourth International as
well as a number of memoirs and primary sources, do not confirm
Service’s glib characterization. [26]

Service focuses on Trotsky’s 1939-1940 polemics with James Burnham
to make his point about Trotsky’s sterile bullying. These were part of
a fierce factional battle in the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that –
when examined in its fullness – actually refutes the point Service is
making. This is documented and succinctly presented in Isaac
Deutscher’s biography:

The American Trotskyists had split into a “majority” which, led
by James P. Cannon, accepted Trotsky’s view, and a “minority” which
followed Burnham and [Max] Shachtman. Trotsky urged all of them to
exercise tact and tolerance; and while he encouraged the “Cannonites”
to conduct the argument against Burnham and Shachtman vigorously, he
also warned them that the Stalinist agents in their ranks would seek to
exacerbate the quarrel; and he advised them to allow the minority to
express itself freely and even to act as an organized faction within
the S.W.P. “If someone should propose … to expel comrade Burnham,” he
gave notice, “I would oppose it energetically.” Even after the minority
had held its own National Convention, Trotsky still counseled the
majority not to treat this as an excuse for expulsions.[27]

As it turned out, the political differences were so sharp that
Burnham, Shachtman, and their co-thinkers felt a need to establish
their own separate organization. The biographers of the two provide
essential information. “In April 1940 Shachtman left the Socialist
Workers Party and founded his own Workers Party on the basis of his own
conceptions,” notes Peter Drucker in his left-wing study of Shachtman.
They simply did not want to be constrained by the limitations of
Trotsky’s perspectives, unlike him seeing the Soviet Union under Stalin
as not simply needing an anti-bureaucratic political revolution but, in
fact, representing a new oppressive form of society as bad as
capitalism (and some would soon say worse than capitalism). This new
group was almost immediately jolted by the discovery that one of its
key theorists was as “bad” as Trotsky had said he was. In his
conservative study of James Burnham (who soon enlisted in the Central
Intelligence Agency and became an editor of the right-wing National Review),
Daniel Kelly notes that “on top of his disillusionment with Trotsky,
Burnham now seemed uncertain about the value of the movement and even
of socialism.” Within weeks, he had abandoned the Workers Party,
explaining to his stunned comrades “that he could no longer accept
Marxism, whose ideas modern historians, economists, and anthropologists
had shown to be false.” [28] It is really not at all surprising that that he and Trotsky had come into such sharp conflict.

Shachtman and his comrades were eventually followed in their exit
from Trotsky’s Fourth International by others having the somewhat
different perspective that the Soviet Union represented simply a new
variant of capitalism (state capitalism). Yet the independent currents
– generating an impressive body of political thought and analysis –
nonetheless retained a positive attitude to Trotsky, in stark contrast
to Burnham (and Service). [29]

Political choices and permanent revolution

Fifteen years after his break, Burnham would denounce the Trotsky
biography of Isaac Deutscher. Near the beginning of the review, he
offered a list of Trotsky’s sins that would certainly not surprise
Service: pride, subjectivism, impatience, and inhumanity. He conceded
that Deutscher’s work was well-researched study and filled in “many
gaps,” and that it showed Trotsky’s considerable talents but
“conscientiously displays, also, Trotsky’s weaknesses, not only those
major flaws that I have already named, but the human failings that were
sometimes the obverse of his talents.” Nonetheless, the biography was
an “intellectual disaster.” The reason was ideological: “Mr. Deutscher
writes from a point of view that accepts and legitimizes the Bolshevik
revolution.” Burnham lamented that “the minds of many of our university
students and opinion-makers are being deeply formed” by Trotsky’s
perspectives which Deutscher sought to convey. “Not all the scholarly
references from all the libraries,” according to Burnham, “are enough
to wash out the Bolshevik stain.” [30]

Service – with the assistance of the Hoover Institution and to the
applause of many pro-capitalist intellectuals – seeks once and for all
to un-do such damage. A central point of this biography, repeated over
and over again, was that Trotsky’s orientation does not represent any
meaningful alternative to Stalinism. Service informs us at the
beginning of the book that “Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin shared more than
they disagreed about.” Near the end of the book he insists that Trotsky
“was close to Stalin in intentions and practice.” (3, 497) The same
theme is sounded more than once in-between – even as the evidence
(sometimes the evidence he himself presents) suggests otherwise.

There were plenty of informed people of the time, both Trotskyist
and non-Trotskyist, who saw things quite differently. Among these was
the eloquent powerhouse of British empire and conservatism Winston
Churchill, who in conversations and writings of the 1930s emphasized
the differences between the revolutionary Trotsky and the much more
reasonable Stalin. The old counter-revolutionary expressed himself most
candidly in a 1938 private conversation with the Soviet Ambassador to
Britain. This was when Stalin’s bloody purge against “the anti-Soviet
Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” was going full throttle. Service
himself offers the story in passing. “I hate Trotsky!” Churchill told
Stalin’s man. “I’ve kept an eye on his activities for some time. He’s
Russia’s evil genius, and it is a very good thing that Stalin has got
even with him.” (465)

Indeed, the cigar-chomping aristocrat had said as much publicly a
year earlier, with all the self-satisfied conservative eloquence he
could muster:

Once again he has become the exponent of the purest sect of
Communism. Around his name gather the new extremists and doctrinaires
of world-revolution. Upon him is turned the full blast of Soviet
malignity. … The name of Lenin, the doctrine of Marx, are invoked
against him at the moment when he frantically endeavors to exploit
them. Russia is regaining strength as the virulence of Communism abates
in her blood. The process may be cruel, but it is not morbid. It is a
need of self-preservation which impels the Soviet Government to extrude
Trotsky and his fresh-distilled poisons.[31]

This, shorn of its excess and its tacit embrace of Stalin, is the
image that Service also offers us, despite a far more positive sub-text
inadvertently pushing up like grass, flowers, and dandelions through
the cracks of his somewhat barren account.

In the youth radicalization of the 1960s and 1970s, many young
activists read the condensed little collection of writings edited by
Isaac Deutscher and George Novack, widely circulated in paperback,
entitled The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology. In the
introduction to that volume, Deutscher described Trotsky’s theory of
permanent revolution – to which Service gives remarkably short shrift –
as “a profound and comprehensive conception in which all the overturns
that the world has been undergoing (in this late capitalist era) are
represented as interconnected and interdependent parts of a single
revolutionary process.” In the theory of permanent revolution, we see
the dynamic interplay of democracy and class struggle, the
self-activity of the masses of laboring and oppressed people reaching
for their own liberation within, while at the same time straining
beyond, the context of global capitalism. Three elements can be found
in Trotsky’s theory: (a) the possibility and necessity, under the right
circumstances, of democratic and immediate struggles spilling over into
the struggle for working-class political power, (b) culminating in a
transitional period going in the direction of socialism, (c) which can
be realized only through the advance of similar struggles around the
world. In fact, these elements permeate Trotsky’s orientation from his
youth to his death. “To put it in the broadest terms,” Deutscher
emphasized, “the social upheaval of our century is seen by Trotsky as
global in scope and character, even though it proceeds on various
levels of civilization and in the most diverse social structures, and
even though its various phases are separated from one another in time
and space.” [32]

Young activists hoping for a better world may be drawn to the
vitality of Trotsky, despite Service’s efforts. It is possible that
some of them may even get their introduction to Trotsky by reading his
book. The assumptions of the Hoover Institution may, after all, turn
out to be less relevant than the life and ideas of Trotsky in face of
what is actually happening in the world. The young activists may
conclude that they are living in the age of permanent revolution, and
then commit their lives to making it so.

[5] Tariq Ali, “The Life and Death of Trotsky,” The Guardian, 31 October 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/200.... Available on ESSF: The life and death of Trotsky.
While Ali’s leftist dissent is uncommon in “mainstream” sources, there
has been a negative chorus forthcoming among the marginalized left –
with critiques available on-line from Peter Taafe, David North, Paul
Hampton, Dave Sherry, and others. Each raises points worth considering
(although I am not persuaded by North’s argument that Service is
cynically “making an appeal to anti-Semites” in the way he writes about
Trotsky).

[13] Elsewhere
in the volume, Service acknowledges Joffe and Rakovsky, among others,
as close friends of Trotsky. In addition, see Alfred and Marguerite
Rosmer, From Syndicalism to Trotskyism: Writings of Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer (London: Porcupine Press, 2000), and Alice Rühle-Gerstel, “No Verses for Trotsky: A Diary (1937),” Encounter,
April 1982, 27-41. Sara Weber also writes of her friendship (seemingly
not an unusual one) with Trotsky and his companion Natalia in
“Recollections of Trotsky,” Modern Occasions, Spring 1972.

[14] "Trotsky
Per Hitchens and Service,” cited in footnote 6. Similar points are
made, with substantial documentation, by Arno J. Mayer – The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The ‘Final Solution’ In History
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). Also see the second volume – dealing
with the civil war – of William Henry Chamberlin’s 1935 classic The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), and David S. Fogelsong, America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism, 1917-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

[19] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1937), 56, 112. The quotation from Marx can be found in The Germany Ideology (1845) – for the full excerpt see Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, eds., Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 427; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works,
Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 37. One could write a
substantial and remarkable doctoral dissertation on the evolution of
Trotsky’s analysis that culminated in The Revolution Betrayed – and fortunately, someone recently has done just that. See Thomas Marshall Twiss, Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy (University of Pittsburgh, 2009).

[26] See Robert J. Alexander, International Trotskyism, 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Pierre Frank, The Fourth International: The Long March of the Trotskyists (London: Ink Links, 1977); George Breitman, “The Rocky Road to the Fourth International, 1933-38” in Anthony Marcus, ed., Malcolm X and the Third American Revolution: The Writings of George Breitman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005), 299-352; James P. Cannon , “Internationalism and the SWP,” in Speeches to the Party
(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 67-91 . Useful material (some of
uneven quality) can also be found in the pages of the journal Revolutionary History – see http://www.revolutionaryhistory.co.uk/.

[28] Peter Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist’s Odyssey Through the “American Century” (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), 109; Daniel Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle for the World, A Life (Wilmington DL: ISI Books, 2002), 84-86.

[29] See Sean Matagamna, ed., The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism (London: Phoenix Press, 1998) and Tony Cliff, Trotskyism After Trotsky: The Origins of the International Socialists (London: Bookmarks, 1999) and A World to Win: Life of a Revolutionary (London: Bookmarks, 2000).